Assamese phonology
Phonology The Assamese phonemic inventory consists of eight vowels, ten diphthongs, and twenty-one consonants.Assamese, Resource Centre for Indian Language Technology Solutions, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. Alveolar stops The Assamese phoneme inventory is unique in the Indic group of languages in its lack of a dental-retroflex distinction among the coronal stops."Assamese, alone among NIA languages except for Romany, has also lost the characteristic IA dental/retroflex contrast (although it is retained in spelling), reducing the number of articulations, with the loss also of /c/, to three." Historically, the dental and retroflex series merged into alveolar stops. This makes Assamese resemble non-Indic languages of Northeast India (such as languages from the Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan languages). The only other language to have fronted retroflex stops into alveolars is the closely related eastern dialects of Bengali (although a contrast with dental stops remains in those dialects). Note that /r/ is normally realized as ɹ or as a retroflex approximant. Voiceless velar fricative Assamese and Sylheti are unusual among Eastern Indo-Aryan languages for the presence of the or ,The sound varies between velar ( ) and a uvular ( ) pronunciations, depending on the speaker and speech register. historically the MIA sibilant has lenited to /x/ and /h/ (non-initially).The word "hare", for example: śaśka (OIA) > χɔhā (hare). The derivation of the velar fricative from the coronal sibilant is evident in the name of the language in Assamese; some Assamese prefer to write or instead of or to reflect the sound change.Whereas most fricatives become sibilants in Eastern Goalpariya (sukh, santi, asa in Eastern Goalpariya; xukh, xanti, axa in western Kamrupi) ; some use of the fricative is seen as in the word xi (for both "he" and "she") and xap khar (the snake) . The is completely absent in Western Goalpariya The voiceless velar fricative is absent in the West Goalpariya dialect as against wide usage in Eastern dialects.B Datta - Linguistic situation in north-east India, 1982 the distinctive h sound of Assamese is absent in the West Goalpariya dialect Assamese is called "Axamiyaa" in the Assamese language. The /x/ there represents the phoneme similar to the variety, which is present in many European Indo-European languages, like sound of 'X' in Greek Xeros (dry), 'ch' of Loch (Lake) Scottish, Bach, Ulrich (proper nouns) in German etc. Apart from Assamese and Sylheti this sound is not to be found in any of the standard Indian languages. Velar nasal Assamese and Bengali, in contrast to other Indo-Aryan languages, use the velar nasal (the English ng in sing) extensively. In many languages, while the velar nasal is commonly restricted to preceding velar sounds, in Assamese it can occur intervocalically. This is another feature it shares with other languages of Northeast India, though in Assamese the velar nasal never occurs word-initially. Vowel inventory Eastern Indic languages like Assamese, Bengali, Sylheti, and Oriya do not have a vowel length distinction, but have a wide set of back rounded vowels. In the case of Assamese, there are four back rounded vowels that contrast phonemically, as demonstrated by the minimal set: কলা kôla ('deaf'), ক'লা kola ('black'), কোলা kûla ('lap'), and কুলা kula ('winnowing fan'). The high-mid back rounded vowel is unique in this branch of the language family. References